About 30 years ago was my first for-pay gig. Still a student I worked for 3 weeks at a small software company (100% daughter of Siemens though and using their office). I was placed together with a recent hire in an office larger than my living room today. We each had a glass terminal connected to the group's i486 (not PC compatible, I believe) workstation with a whopping 32MiB RAM running SCO Unix (crashed about once a day but was said to be much more stable than Siemen's own Unix ;-}
I was to port some C code implementing TIFF into their graphics library. This was before the WWW took off (or known to me). They had Internet (with a host naming scheme incorporating building and floor, so byzantine that we found it easier to remember the dotted-quad IP address), but I don't recall for what or to which extend it was used. So a good part of the job was to read printed documentation.
vi was used in that group as text editor and I was expected to do the same. I hadn't seen it before and when given the two page cheat-sheet, I thought it was worse than WordStar in (already long obsolete) CP/M. Learned the basics quick enough though and even grew to appreciate it when using a terminal connected via 9600baud RS232 ...
We enjoyed flexible working hours, with a core time from 11am to 2pm where people were expected to be in the office (in order to ease scheduling of meetings, of which I recall none; we met at lunch in the cafeteria though). I had to leave before 8pm though, as then the porter would lock up the building.
I was to port some C code implementing TIFF into their graphics library. This was before the WWW took off (or known to me). They had Internet (with a host naming scheme incorporating building and floor, so byzantine that we found it easier to remember the dotted-quad IP address), but I don't recall for what or to which extend it was used. So a good part of the job was to read printed documentation.
vi was used in that group as text editor and I was expected to do the same. I hadn't seen it before and when given the two page cheat-sheet, I thought it was worse than WordStar in (already long obsolete) CP/M. Learned the basics quick enough though and even grew to appreciate it when using a terminal connected via 9600baud RS232 ...
We enjoyed flexible working hours, with a core time from 11am to 2pm where people were expected to be in the office (in order to ease scheduling of meetings, of which I recall none; we met at lunch in the cafeteria though). I had to leave before 8pm though, as then the porter would lock up the building.